There are a ton of reasons you end up dropping an anime. It could have lackluster animation, flat characters (not just 2D I mean), wonky pacing, an unappealing artstyle, a generic isekai story, or for whatever reason just doesn’t connect with you. One reason I’ve never had to personally deal with before is “the subs are just too shit to comprehend”. I’ve been watching seasonal anime for years at this point and sure a production may have some weird translations here or there with fan subs, but usually it’s done well enough to retain 80-90% of the author’s intent which is good enough for me to appreciate a fansubbed project. Well I’m afraid there’s a first time for everything. 

I picked up Girls Band Cry this season because of the buzz around the first episode, and man I loved it. The 3D animation is some of the crispiest I’ve seen for a seasonal anime. Shows like this often get a bad reputation purely based on choosing to do 3D in the first place, but I think the animators here did a fantastic job of bringing the characters to life with a ton of expressions and movements. Often considered a weak point of 3D, the characters’ emotions here came through clearer than many generically drawn 2D anime in my eyes. But it doesn’t matter how much I want to appreciate the animation, characters, or story when I can barely piece together what’s happening in every scene because the subs are so horrendous. I’m not talking about how sometimes the subs miss a basic “sugoi” or don’t quite capture the meaning of the Japanese. We’re in a wacky universe where “arigatou gozaimasu” transforms into “Thank you and Godspeed!” which let me tell you, does not translate to Godspeed actually. These errors are so frequent it’s impossible to build up much if any immersion. 

Um... what?

When I looked into this with Kinky we found people claiming that the person who did these translations, listed as Sarah in the credits, is actually a French translator. She translated it into French working with a Japanese organization called the JSICMF. Then, someone took Sarah’s French translation, ran that through an auto-translator, and then posted the subs onto the episodes. That would explain why so many of the subs come across as if a non-English speaker wrote them. At best they’re not natural and at worst not understandable. Sometimes the machine will just miss a French word entirely as “fête” was left in a sentence at one point which left me scratching my head before I figured out what is supposedly going on.

Surely this phrase has some sort of meaning in French.

I’ve hoped for weeks now that they would be properly fixed (it didn’t seem this bad in episode one, but 2-4 were ruined) and I wouldn’t have to drop this anime because I really wanted to appreciate what they did with the 3D medium here to push it forward. Plus, the writers weren't afraid to make these characters a lot more flawed than your typical girl band show. The MC especially has a TON of growing up to do, which is fascinating to watch compared to most band shows where everyone loves each other and there’s no disagreements ever. That being said, I’m not about to force myself to dig through these machine-generated subs that lose the meaning of every other sentence. Hell, I wrap my head around more of the dialogue when I stop reading and listen to the raw Japanese sometimes. Do you give 3D anime a chance? Are you watching Girls Band Cry? Have you had to drop an anime based on the subs alone? Put a hand on your key of board, type sugoi messages to the others online, and mention your narrative of poor stinky subs in the comments below the article!